Big Switch Networks Appoints Tony Bates to its Board of Directors

Big Switch Networks, the leader in Software-Defined Networking (SDN),
today announced the addition of industry veteran Tony Bates to the
company’s Board of Directors. Bates was a long time senior executive at
Cisco Systems, and is currently the President of the Skype division of
Microsoft. He joins industry veterans Mike Volpi, Shirish Sathaye, Mark
Leslie, Bill Meehan and co-founders Guido Appenzeller and Kyle Forster
on the company’s Board.

As president of the Skype Division of Microsoft, Bates is responsible
for overseeing the division’s direction, strategy and overall mission.
Before joining as CEO of Skype, he spent more than a decade at Cisco
Systems where he served as SVP and GM of several business groups,
including Enterprise, Commercial and Small Business, and Cisco’s core
high-end router business. Before joining Cisco, Tony spearheaded the
backbone-engineering strategy for Internet MCI (MCI’s national IP
backbone) and holds ten patents in the area of Layer 2 and 3
innovations. Prior to joining the board of Big Switch, Tony served as a
board member of several other successful startups, including YouTube
(GOOG) and Lovefilm (AMZN).

“IT leaders are increasingly looking to virtualization and cloud
orchestration to address the escalating need for scale and cost
efficiencies in data centers. Software Defined Networking is a crucial
next step in the realization of the multi-tenant public or private cloud
data center, representing a dramatic shift in the one part of the data
center that has not kept pace with other innovations, which is the
network,” said Tony Bates, Big Switch Networks Director. “By embracing
industry standards andopen APIs, Big Switch Networks is leading the way
in Open SDN."

“Tony brings a valuable perspective and deep industry knowledge to Big
Switch as we go to market with our generally available Open SDN product
suite,” said Guido Appenzeller, CEO and co-founder of Big Switch
Networks. "We are fortunate to have someone of Tony's caliber
contributing to our strategy and our growth.”

CIO, CTO & Developer Resources

About Big Switch Networks

Big Switch Networks is the leader in Open Software-Defined Networking.
The company’s Open SDN platform embraces industry standards, open APIs,
open source, and vendor-neutral support for both physical and virtual
networking infrastructure. Big Switch Networks product suite supports a
broad range of networking applications, including network virtualization
for public and private cloud data centers built upon OpenStack,
CloudStack
and other platforms. Big Switch Networks is privately held and has
raised over $45M from Goldman Sachs, Intel Capital, Index Ventures,
Khosla Ventures, Redpoint Ventures and others. For additional
information follow us @bigswitchor visit: bigswitch.com

Big Switch Networks and the Big Switch Networks logo are trademarks
of Big Switch Networks in the United States and other countries.*Other
names and brands may be claimed as the property of others.

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